Ep 248: Ideas for Asian Food and Wine Pairing (Test Kitchen ep)

Wine for Normal People

Alcohol, Lifestyle, Arts, Education, Food, Wine, Dining, Grapes

4.6 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 29 September 2018

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We couldn't hit every food, or every wine, but this sampling was done at our kitchen table -- as an experiment with Chinese, Thai, Japanese, and Indian foods. We had some great pairing moments and some colossally bad ones (I didn't realize things could go SO wrong with wine and Asian food, but here's your warning)! Enjoy!

Use the flavors/pairing ideas to apply pairings to things with similar sauces and wines with similar flavors:

Chinese

Fried rice: Off-Dry German Riesling, Arneis, Pinot Grigio (Fuller style, ours was German but a Pinot Gris from Alsace, France or Alto Adige, Italy will work too)

Spring roll: Absolutely nothing. This was an epic fail.

Lo Mein: MVP was Dry German Riesling , Pinot Grigio (Fuller style) or Pinot Gris was good

Chicken and broccoli in a brown sauce: MVP was DRY German Riesling, also Arneis, off-dry German Riesling

Beef and broccoli in a brown sauce: Pinot Grigio (fuller style) was the only thing that worked ok. You need a heavier white that isn't too aromatic to work here. Pinot Noir was a disaster.

Thai

Eggplant in a basil sauce: MVP was Chablis -- it magnified the basil and made the dish sing, Roero Arneis wasn't bad either

Yellow Curry and Vegetables: MVP was Dry Riesling -- it cut the spice but didn't detract from the flavor. Our full Pinot Grigio was good and made the spice taste smooth too.

Pad Thai: We forgot to mention this in the show because it was forgettable. The off-dry Riesling was just BARELY ok. Nothing goes well with Pad Thai that we had on our table. Let me know if you find something different!

Scallion pancake: Off-dry Riesling, Gewurztraminer

Sushi/Japanese (small sample set here)

Spicy tuna roll: Dry and off-dry Riesling were best

Yellowtail with jalapeño: NOTHING

Avocado/Vegetable roll: Off-dry Riesling

Indian

Masalas: Off-dry Riesling

Curry/Korma: Off-dry Riesling

Lentil dishes (dal): Gewurztraminer

Saag Paneer (Spinach): Off-dry Riesling, some richer dry Rieslings

Pretty much everything: Off-dry Riesling, some dry Rieslings

As I said, this is just a small focus group of two, but we wanted to provide some guardrails on pairing for you. There were some really terrible moments, but the stuff we found was actually delicious!

Thanks to our sponsors this week:

YOU! The podcast supporters on Patreon, who are helping us to make the podcast possible and who we give goodies in return for their help! Check it out today: https://www.patreon.com/winefornormalpeople

Last Bottle

I love this service!! Last Bottle Wines finds great wines and offers them at a one time discount. Last Bottle Wines:

Is a fun way to discover the best wines at the lowest prices
Maintains relationships with producers in the most prestigious wine regions around the world and traveling to Europe several times each year to eat with, stay with, drink with, walk the vineyards with the people who make the wines.
Offer a range of prices from low end to high end $9 to $99 and the wines range from the lesser known kinds like Albariño and Bläufrankish to Cabernet, Merlot and Chardonnay.

Visit: http://lastbottlewines.com/normal and join to get a $10 instant credit to use toward your first order. Invite your wine drinking pals and they’ll get $10 instantly and you get $30 when they make their first buy.

The Great Courses Plus

Who doesn't want to learn!? The Great Courses Plus makes you smarter and more well rounded. With thousands of outstanding video lectures that you can watch or listen to any time and anywhere, The Great Courses Plus is an easy way to stimulate your brain and make you smarter!

For a free trial, support the show and go to my special URL
www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/wine

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Thanks for
0:08.0	downloading Wine for Normal People Radio,
0:10.0	the podcast for people who like wine but not the snobbery that goes with it.
0:14.0	I'm Elizabeth Schneider, a certified Silmaier and certified specialist of wine.
0:20.0	And I'm MC Ice, just a wine-loving normal person.
0:24.4	So this podcast was recorded as we were eating the food
0:27.7	and there's probably some things that we forgot.
0:30.0	But what I wanted to just illustrate with the show is that there are very limited options in my opinion of what you can do with Asian food in terms of pairings and we as MCI says paid the dumb tax. So some other things we did not
0:46.0	have on our table that you might want to consider but again they could be a
0:49.6	little bit risky sparkling wine especially something like a proceco that has a little bit of
0:55.0	fruitiness or sweetness probably could go pretty well with some of the things that we talked about
0:59.6	when we talked about a dry resling or sweet resling so you can try that too. Also rosé but we run
1:07.2	into some problems with rosé in that although it does calm spice down sometimes it can have a little bit too much fruitiness to it and
1:16.1	that flavor can not go well, meaning it has red berry notes to it as opposed to some of the
1:21.7	flavors and aromatics that we have in whites.
1:24.0	I still stand by what I say in the podcast, which is that whites really are the MVP,
1:28.0	that reds have almost no place with Asian food in my palette, But you can definitely try sparkling wine, you can try
1:36.1	Rosay. For Riesling, you may want to try something like Grunner, Veltina from Austria. You may want to try an Alberigno from Spain or a Verdejo.
1:45.0	Sylviee-Blanc generally tends not to be a good fit with this kind of cuisine.
1:50.0	It has too strong a character, but again you can try it.
1:53.5	And at one point in the podcast I think I said don't try wines from all
1:56.9	sauce.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Wine for Normal People, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Wine for Normal People and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.